During my attendance this week at the 2 day virtual convention, it was great to hear from multiple corporates saying that they were trialling the Blockchain technologies.
It was good to see, that some of them were even scaling out production implementations.
The tough stuff first.
Issues highlighted include:
Developing technology increases risk
Effort required to coordinate multi-organisational consortia
Costs of Infrastructure
Governance over multiple Jurisdictions & Identity
Managing high Quantity of Data on and off chain
Interoperability with multiple blockchain platforms And existing platforms
Risk of fast developing technologies & few standards in place
These are standard risks for many start-ups, but not ones as easy to handle for cost centres in Corporates. How do you show return on investment across multiple companies, within the internal organisation.
If corporates don’t get involved however, the risk is, as always cost of missing out on the latest innovations.
In my opinion is that corporates should be at the table and part of the conversation, and if they aren’t already investigating or trialling it, then, why not?
It is true, and does feel very sad that crypto-currency issues, and risky investment in coin offerings in 2018-2019, have put so many companies from investing in Blockchain.
To illustrate the point, of lack of investment, in Blockchain trials, the highest number of Blockchain patents come from Alibaba, currently.
If enough companies aren’t filing patents, then the probability is that the market will be cornered, by a few players.
Obviously this reduces opportunity for other companies and choices, for consumers.
Ok, the good stuff..
The benefits were made clear to me, this week.
- Double digit return on investment, in production, within a year, even on lower scale project.
- Return in investment and cost-efficiency, within 2 years at high scale of 5 million devices
The large scale, project did have issues with, “keeping up” with the developing technologies, but using DevOps and future-proofing the code/infrastructure, with abstraction layers, and micro-services, they were able to launch after 2years.
So how do you get started?
The standard prototype development model is applicable.
There is an additional dimension required.
To gain the highest return, or efficiency savings, multiple discrete entities need to share information.
How and what information is shared, across a consortia, could be risky.
The learnings have shown, that taking small slices of the model, i.e starting minimum 3 entities, sets up the prototype, and then can scale to add other entities.
A mindset change, is usually easier with evidence to back it up, within the organisations. "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."
Summary
At the convention, there was huge excitement about the projects that were developing and the current projects in progress.
The consensus was that although, the issues are challenging, there are a few use-cases where Centralised & Decentralised solutions, work well in tandem.
There is definitely an interest in the Decentralised finance (De-Fi) with the appropriate governance, of course.
Equally there is high interest in the Pharma sector.
There is huge potential for clinical trials. Patients owning their own data, and Monetising it in standards formats, within their control
There are so many benefits to be gained, yet companies are loathe to dip their toe in the water.
During the COVID crisis, there were several apps using Blockchain developed within months, which gives you an idea, of the level of effort required.
Please do reach out for any information required.